On to the front garden

At a time when things in the garden are changing and also appearing out of the blue I am sad to say I did not get to walk through it today. Instead I stayed inside with DH while our DirecTV satellite installation was completed. Others are bookworms. I am a TV slug. I love movies, a few shows like The Closer, Fox News, football and small doses of other sports that DH likes. But mainly I hate the huge bills that Cox Cable was sending us every month, so the change was made, and I like it.

However, that leaves me with no memories or photos of today. The missed photos of ‘Polonaise’ yesterday were followed by more missed photos today. Is distressing too strong a word for my feelings? Well, maybe you understand. I do have some photos from Sunday, so I’ll just pretend today didn’t happen. Ooh, I don’t like the sound of that. Here’s Sunday.

This is the northeast corner of the circle which is situated in full southern sun. It’s almost a vanity shot with some gratuitous boasting thrown in. Leaves, leaves, and more leaves…and green leaves! I cherish spring for the leaves it brings, but I apologize if it’s a boring blob. To me it’s dense foliage. What could be better, I ask you? Or until now, rarer? Maturity brings all kinds of improvement, you know, and bushy rose bushes have been a wishful dream for me, so I can only hope leaves are here to stay. I don’t think you can see clearly the distinction between the bushes. I’ll tell you what and where and maybe with a zoom capability you can see where one ends and the next begins. Bottom right: ‘Clotilde Soupert’; bottom left: ‘Souvenir de Francois Gaulain’; above him: ‘Duquesa’; to the right: three bushes of ‘Hermosa’; top middle: ‘Pinkie, Climbing’; far left: another ‘Clotilde Soupert’; and top left: ‘Clotilde Soupert, Climbing’. These are my leafiest roses. Glorious, aren’t they?



‘Le Vesuve’ is on his way. He’s not quick out of the gate because he loves the heat, but above him yesterday was a veritable cloud of flower buds. I eagerly wait.



My volunteer larkspur forest. I’ve been assuming that they would all be purple because that’s the color they were last year. What a pleasing surprise when I saw that they are also lavender and pink. I do hope that the breeze blows their seeds absolutely everywhere. The pink one on the right sprouted from a vacant rose pot. I never even considered pulling it out – even to transplant.



This is ‘Lilian Austin’. She was a tiny thing after pruning. Her eagerness to get going is a nice surprise. She’s blooming on new growth that is only a few inches long.



Another ‘Lilian Austin’ bud.



The grande dame of my daylilies, ‘Sherry Lane Carr’. Some of you may not know that my affinity for this daylily is rooted in her name. You see it’s almost the same as mine. Change one little letter, and you get Sherry Jane Carr, the girl I used to be before marriage changed everything. Seeing this daylily’s name in print still catches at my breath and makes my heart flutter. It must be the thrill of fame – sort of, or at least as close as I’ll ever get. Anyway, this plant is a division of one that was buried about three feet back, under ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’. I dug up that plant in February, I think, divided it in two, and they never missed a beat. This one has a budded scape. The other original plant that I did not divide but which is really quite huge has six scapes on it… the last time I looked anyway.



‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’ or 'Borderer' and friend. Looks too peachy to be SDLM, but I can't be sure.



Does anyone else buy packaged bulbs and bareroots with the best of intentions and then sort of forget them? I really need to stop buying them because so many don’t make it into the ground. This new sprout is a dahlia ‘Le Baron’, one of three planted about ten days ago. Hopefully, the other two will pop up and join this one.



The first Purple Coneflower blooms don’t look as shabby as first blooms usually do. They’re a welcome sight.



And more are coming.



‘Softee’ is underway. She’s a miniature that grows in a pot. By the way she’s almost thornless and quite healthy and pretty.



‘Le Vesuve’ again.



This is ‘Anda’, a small polyantha single. This flower is about two inches across, maybe a tad less, and the petals have a habit of rolling on one edge or the other for a rather unique look. Her color is really deep red which usually explodes in my camera as fuschia. I think she’s darker than this photo shows, but at least it’s red – on my monitor anyway. She gets some black spot but not terrible.



The ‘Queen of Beauty and Fragrance’ again, followed by the nightmare of every rosarian.



This is a balled flower of SDLM. It will never open, sealed shut by untimely moisture and/or thrips. This time I think it was moisture in the form of Saturday night’s downpour in the middle of a thunderboomer.



he-he. No, it’s not a very grainy photo of the garage wall. It’s a photo of the bird netting I “installed” so the two clematis vines would have something to hold onto – hopefully. I didn’t expect the mesh to be this small, only half inch. Hopefully, that will not be an impediment to their climbing. I also put some of the netting on ‘Maman Cochet, Climbing’ since her companion clematis ‘Duchess of Albany’ has had to lay on the ground for two years unable to grab hold of that Tea Rose’s thick canes.



This one is ‘Henryi’ (closer to the camera above).



And this one is ‘Westerplatte’. Hopefully, the snapdragons on both sides of them will keep their rootzones cooler.



This is clematis ‘Princess Diana’, already to the top of the four-foot obelisk.


So cottage-y. Hopefully, this ethereal sight distracts from the big hole on the left side of the garden…


…where ‘Maggie’ is just getting started.


Gardeners can’t have it all all the time. There’s always something not quite right – or very wrong. We hope no one else notices.

Ready or not, here I prune!

Winter? Absolutely no sign of it here.  Daytime temps are way up in the 70’s and sunny, and nights are fine for shirt-sleeves.  I did a search for a 30-day forecast, hoping to find our ‘last freeze date’, and came up with precious little. One site showed the lowest temperature would be 36 degrees in mid-February.  Not a problem, so yesterday when I heard the roses crying, “Pru-u-une me.”, I said, “I hear ya. Here I come.”  Everything is showing new growth (‘Hermosa’ is even blooming!), and I had had enough of looking at the ugly dead stuff from the freeze. Did you catch that? Freeze singular? What a winter!



Since ‘Madame Abel Chatenay’ was the instigator, I better start with her last weekend. You may remember that MAC was suffering terribly and that I had determined to lift her, amend the bed and move her a few feet. So I was back to excavating again - this time to a depth of three and a half feet. I dug out an area of 3’x6’ (thankfully, the clay was moist and diggable) right beside her toward the house and moved the five or six wheelbarrowfuls of crappy stuff to the backyard, raising the level of the swing area. I’m almost not heavy enough to push that wheelbarrow when it’s full.

Then I had an enlightened moment and decided to stick the pH tester in one of the big clumps of solid white clay. I was stunned to read 6.8. Huh? I can live with that pH, so what’s the problem?  I tested the fertility. Uh-huh, very low.  Then I tested the grainy sand/clay strata that was above the clay level - 6.0 pH (apparently my sulfur applications have worked) and very low fertility. Interesting.  Breaking up the bottom, I mixed in Milorganite, cow manure and small pine bark mulch with the clay, then filled up the hole with more compost, topsoil (by the way, I found Walmart’s topsoil to be plain old sand), a little sphagnum peat moss, pine bark mulch, Scott’s LawnSoil, and the original top 15 inches of amended soil that I had set aside. End of day one.

On Sunday I lifted ‘Mme Abel’ and set her aside on the new bed.  Time was of the essence since she was sitting in the sun, so I opted to pile the removed soil on the driveway.  By way of visuals much of my digging time was spent sitting on the ground with one leg dangling in the hole while the other pounded the shovel into the clay, then muscling the shovelful over my shoulder beside and behind me.  I found out that getting out of a three and a half foot deep hole isn’t easy when you’re an arthritic old lady, so again I returned to my butt and rolled to my knees to regain sea-level.  Don’t you wish you had a ringside seat?  Dumping on the driveway made the job much quicker, and I got her settled in with scratches on arms and legs.  She’s a very prickly lady, definitely well armed. Here she is, albeit hard to see.





She’s to the right of the label marker which used to be in front of her, so she didn’t go far. A big Variegated Liriope was moved out, too, so the vacant area will be home to about four daylilies. The rose in the white pot is a ‘Peach Drift’.  I got two the other day.  I thought their color would go great with ‘Mme Abel’, so they’re planted on both sides of her now.  FYI, I shoveled the dirt from the driveway into the truck for easy transport to the back. It filled half the bed as high as the sides. I was astonished because this hole was only 3'x3'x3' - half the size of the previous day. Highly compacted stuff.

Back to this weekend’s pruning. I did not not cut back MAC when I dug her up, and rather unbelievably her growth buds are bulging everywhere and her one flower bud only went limp overnight.  So I figured I might as well prune her…along with ‘Clotilde Soupert’, ‘Souv de Francois Gaulain’, the three ‘Hermosas’ and half of ‘Le Vesuve’.  Then darkness set in. Today I finished ‘Le Vesuve’. My goodness, what a tangled mess he is. He grows all wacky in all directions and back again. He had a lot of dead stuff on him, so as I‘ve been saying I would for months, I finally replaced the drip tubing with two 180-degree micro-sprinkler heads for his circle bed.  I’m hoping this will make him happier this year.  Then I moved on to ‘Bermuda’s Anna Olivier’.  What a bedraggled rose bush, so full of dead and dying stuff.  Her soil situation is like MAC’s was, but I’ve decided to handle hers differently.  I’m going to drive a 3/4” pole into the ground as close to three feet down as I can get, then pour a bunch of Milorganite down the zillion holes I make along with some liquid humus.  Since the soil problem looks more like a fertility issue rather than pH, I’m hoping this strategy will save me from digging and more digging again.

I vipped on to ‘Softee’ in a pot and the two ‘Souvenir de la Malmaisons’ (dead stuff only on SDLM), and then quit pruning.  I find pruning to be very exhausting, physically and mentally.  That bent over position is a pain, and examining each and every cut makes for a mentally demanding exercise in decision-making that wears me out.  When I was done with these, my brain was mush, and I barely managed to move an under-a-rose daylily and plant a lovely potted purple pansy next to MAC and a $7 ‘Chrysler Imperial’ from Lowe's next to the front sidewalk.  It’s grafted on Dr. Huey rootstock, so I figure if it lasts a couple of years, I’ll be happy to have had those gorgeous red blooms and the phenomenal fragrance again.

So once again I have found pruning to be a wonderfully satisfying experience.  The roses took a giant step closer to spring.  I on the other hand have many more to go.

November flush flushes on

This year the huge difference between the summer flushes and this November flush is leaves. They’re back!! And they’re beautiful. It may sound backwards, but to me leaves on a rose bush are the icing on the cake (buttercream is my yummy favorite). It’s not absurd to say that blooms are a dime a dozen, but leaves are precious after a dry Florida summer in which the bushes in my garden either couldn't or wouldn't grow leaves for weeks and weeks. Self-preservation?

I love the green stuff – leaves!

'Hermosa', a China-Bourbon from 1840, is a consistent bloomer, and her smallish, globular flowers are a vivid lavender pink. Her leaves are lovely, but most of the summer she was decidedly underclothed.

I have three 'Hermosa' bushes planted together a la David Austin's custom of planting in threes for greater impact. Of course, in the United States where most climates are warmer than in England, most Austins as well as non-Austins give plenty of impact one at a time. 'Hermosa' in bloom is always a joyful sight, virtually eliminating her chances of ever being shovel-pruned.

You can see that the three 'Hermosa' plants are on the diminutive side - about 40 inches high by two feet wide late in the season. In the background 'Pinkie, Climbing' is a very bushy thing with one or two clusters of flowers. Not exactly an overwhelming fall flush. In the foreground 'Souvenir de Francois Gaulain' is loaded with buds as is 'Clotilde Soupert' to his right and below.

The lovely and fragrant 'Clotilde Soupert', a Polyantha-Tea from 1889, suffered not so silently through the summer, looking bare and sickly, but suddenly after another weekend not spent in the garden I found her lushly green and covered with buds. Going through my photos last night I was shocked to see that a month ago she was also covered with flowers. She's definitely a rapid rebloomer.

'Clotilde Soupert' with lots of buds and a few spent ones left. What a pleasant surprise to see her like this when I got home from the Marion County Rose Society meeting yesterday.

'White Maman Cochet' just doesn't stop. She's only been in the ground since March (remember the driveway bed?), so she's still gawky and somewhat lopsided from growing only in one or two directions - so far, but she's a serious bloomer. Just as the last batch of five or six have dropped their petals, her buds that have been in hiding burst open and take my breath away.

Now 'Madame Abel Chatenay' has been in bloom for a month or more. She's slowing down a bit now and has some new healthy foliage but not anywhere near as dense as I'm used to seeing on her. I'm pretty sure I'm going to move her this winter toward the house about four feet, re-amending her new and old spots. That will make room for another rose (maybe 'Starry Night') or lots of daylilies. It all depends on how much of that crappy, impenetrable native soil I can remove. It occurs to me that this 'lifting & re-amending' may be a triennial occurrence.

But she's worth it, don't you think?

 

'Le Vesuve', always thrilling to me.

You may doubt me, but this too is 'Le Vesuve'. As she ages, her blooms become very pale pink, almost white, making her a bush of many shades of pink.

'Souvenir de la Malmaison' - if I had to have only two roses...  no, three... there's no way I could only have two. Alas, there's no way I could only have ten. Hey, there's a post topic in that. Anyway, the two would be 'Souv de la Malmaison' and 'Le Vesuve'. But just so you know... it ain't happenin'.

The Encore azalea basks in the glory of 'Souv de la Malmaison' on the left and the right. Personally, I don't see how they can call it a summer blooming azalea or even a repeat bloomer, but at least it's not dead like the three others.

'Duquesa', the Tea rose from 2005, has been transformed from the summer bush that had such teensy pale flowers into the cool-weather heart-stopper with her large, flat, fragrant, peachy flowers, so well branched and foliated, as you can see below. She was planted a year ago this past September, and she's more than four feet by four feet.

  
 

'Sweet Chariot' is a miniature and a great rose. Her magenta pom-pom flowers are a delight, and she's quite healthy.

Oops, 'Le Vesuve' thinks it's been way too long since she was the center of attention and the topic of discussion.

Bush shots are so difficult. This photo is a horrible representation of this 'Clotilde Soupert'. Her many-petaled blooms just look like white blobs, and her foliage doesn't look nearly as well recovered from the dreadful summer as they do in person. I would have left out this photo, but I could not leave out this rose. Such a wonderful garden rose should not be overlooked in Florida. With a little more acidity in the soil she would be as happy as happy can be.

'Madame Lombard' plays tricks on the camera.  You'd think she were a mostly white rose, but she's far from it. This photo does, however, show the sticky-ness of a young Tea rose. She's not a mass of leaves yet, just a few twiggy canes with little tufts of flowers and leaves at their tops.

Mme Lombard's flowers are shades of deep pink and very variable. She was bred in 1878 and arrived in my garden a year ago last month.

She can rightly brag about her gorgeous blooms, and this time next year she'll probably have some heft to back it up. I recently was reminded just how large she will be.

Right now she's throwing canes wide and low and taller, too. She could easily get to eight feet tall and almost as wide, but it's the width that unnerves me.

This camera simply can not get a handle on 'Madame Lombard'. Today she was a deeper rose color to my eye that this photo shows.

Here's a whole bush shot. The recurve of her petals must reflect light funny, so that the camera sees white instead of pink. Can you find where she begins and ends? If you ran a line from left to right from the faded clematis on the tuteur, that would be the back edge of ML. See the blue flowers? That's the plumbago. Mme Lombard probably has extended her canes into Mr. Plumbago's territory, and since I'm standing in my neighbor's yard to take this picture, you can figure ML will be gracing Linda with her presence pretty soon. The space allotted to this rose was six by six. Can you hear 'Madame Lombard' laughing at me?

Audacious deadheading

In my small garden I believe the days of timid (and quick & easy) snapping of spent blooms are in the past. Yesterday I took pruners in hand and set out to limit at least some of the expansionism of my rose bushes in the front garden. Turns out most of them were full of thrips so the timing was good, and now there are no flowers left, except for 'Le Vesuve'.  In the process I discovered a very cool thing about polyanthas.

I have always struggled with how to deadhead these cluster-blooming polyanthas (I'm not sure but modern floribundas might work the same way), not wanting to remove any growth or future blooming from my young plants that I desperately wanted to be bigger - soon. I have two 'Clotilde Soupert's, 'Lauren', 'Softee', 'Anda', 'Cal Poly', 'Etoile de Mai' and 'Sweet Chariot'. Most of the time their clusters have two main stems, one coming off at an angle with a small leaf at the base.  Sometimes I would just grab the cluster as though I was shaking hands with it and pull it through, stripping off the flowers, and sometimes I would cut the cluster stem but never far enough to remove the unsightly leftover stems or ugly naked clusters, fearing budeyes were there. Yesterday I found that these plants are amazingly consistent. Looking back along the cane from the cluster or from the occasional single blooms, past the small leaf at the base of the angled bloom stem, the next leaf always had a leaf bud sprouting from the budeye. That's where I cut. Sometimes that second leaf was a pretty long distance from the cluster, but I cut there anyway, knowing that any extra cane I left would simply die and turn brown and ugly.

Beautiful rose bush: 'Clotilde Soupert', bred in 1889 in Luxembourg by Soupert & Notting

The result of my audacious deadheading was a beautifully shaped bush ('Clotilde Soupert' is the prettiest evergreen plant I know) with no ugly pedicels sticking up (left behind after snapping off only the flower) and no naked clusters waiting to turn brown, AND by removing at least 8" of growth I believe I went a long way toward keeping them a manageable size for my increasingly packed garden. Of course, the negative side of this practice is the time and effort it demands. Oh, well, no such thing as a free lunch - even in rose gardens.

'Mme Abel Chatenay', always so beautiful, was not this spring. Her flowers were fringed in brown and didn't last long at all. The problem? Her first attack of thrips. So disgusting. So all of her flowers and buds are gone, too, in an effort to rid the garden of these teensy beasties. You can spot the infested buds by the brown stains on the unfurled petals. She's getting pretty big, too, so it was an opportunity to downsize and shape her up just a bit.

Since they are smallish plants, my three 'Hermosa' bushes are planted closely in a triangle for maximum impact. I've been deadheading them this way since last year since reading that being part Bourbon they benefit from this trimming and will be bushier and less spindly. Some of the plants did not end up as a 'pretty bush' like CS did, since they had already become a little spindly, but I have the hope of pretty bushes when they fill out after this more intensive nipping. Like pruning azaleas after spring bloom, they respond with new growth and more leaves. Even though these were also showing new growth at the budeyes, sometimes I went past the first one, trying to make them a little more compact and symmetrical.

The three 'Hermosa' bushes with the bright green leaves are at the back along the sidewalk and driveway. This is in August, 2009, and I was struggling to keep leaves on my bushes without much success. It turned out the problem was lack of water. I was watering by hand every other day after work. Now I have a micro system that runs every morning for 30 minutes and uses less water. The twiggy thing under the tire is one of the 'Clotilde Soupert's, really suffering. A 'Red Ruffle' azalea is in the middle, and 'Souv de Francois Gaulain' is at the bottom.

Same camera position today, a year and a half later. You can't see the azalea, but it's still there. SdFG with the blue-green leaves is at the bottom, taking up much more space. Hopefully, you can see the 'Hermosa's sticking up at the top, and CS minus all her flowers is to the right of the tire. 'Lauren' and 'Sweet Chariot' are in pots at the bottom corners.

In getting rid of the infecting flowers and buds I've read that we're supposed to put them in a sealed bag and throw them away with the trash because they fly and will move on to destroy other flowers. When I had removed them before, that was what I did. However, this time I had a very large reusable 'debris bag' made of tarp material that was full of trimmings of all sorts that I would normally dump at the curb for the garden waste truck. (No, I could not drag two bags behind me in the baking sun. I'm not that organized and don't think that far ahead - maybe next time. Having one bag with me at the start was unusually well planned for me.)

So...what could I do with these awful bugs? I found some old ant & roach spray in the garage (we have tubes-in-the-walls pest control, so we no longer have to spray for the nasties.) I sprayed the contents a lot and folded the top down and stood my handy pick-ax on it. Handy? I failed to put it away when I dug the driveway bed. I'm so terrible, but it worked out well this time, except that I stubbed my bare toe on the blade the other day. Ouch!! I might give the bag another dose of roach spray before I put the contents out at the curb next week. Surely they will have died cooped up in that bag with those poison fumes, don't you think? OK, let's not be dumb. I googled and found that Permethrin kills thrips. I'll go read the Raid can........YES, it has it!!

To sum up, knowing where to cut my rose bushes is a huge relief and makes my new, more demanding task simpler at least. Probably doing a bush or two in an evening won't be too difficult, especially since it's only once every six to eight weeks, and while I'm at it, it will be exhilarating realizing that I know better now what I'm doing with these roses. Little by little, they say. Fortunately, old garden roses don't care too much if their gardener is less than brilliant.

The garden centerpiece, 'Le Vesuve'. Perhaps you remember him after pruning. Well, he is again bulging at the brick borders of this 6-ft diameter bed. He's probably 4-1/2 feet tall. It just occurs to me that he makes me look brilliant. Now you know the truth!